Echar Raíces en el Aire. Installation, 2022. El Hilo Vibrante, Museos del Banco Central, San José, Costa Rica, 2022.
My parents arrived in Costa Rica during the 70s and started to build a dislocated identity and narrative from their country of origin. In a way the construction started generating an island, but this hasn’t been a physical island, but a familiar one. They didn’t have roots at hand, nor a roof over their heads, and found themselves creating a place of belonging with their bonds. My mother and father built my and my sisters’ roots in a place that wasn’t always tangible. It was an island that germinated aerial roots and designed a roof with what they were able to gather in their surroundings. They were able to receive help from many people like the Chinese/Taiwanese community in Costa Rica, the Acón Family from Puntarenas, the Solano Rojas Family, neighboors, friends, family members, all of them filled with love and will. During my childhood this place was my universe: my only refuge, the place where I belonged. I can recognize that what conforms me, the good and the bad, is a result of this particular insular experience.
For many years, minutes and seconds I felt anguish and fear: fear of the emptiness that existed for me outside of my island. The bond that we have in my nuclear family is a very special one, aside of the 5 of us there were no more of “us”. The number 5 was melted into a unit. Through our life in Costa Rica this island with self-germinated roots and roof has served as a place of belonging for hundreds of people as well, all of whom due to multiple different reasons but governed by the common denominator of distance and search of holding have found not only a physical space that receives them with delicious comfort food, smiles, Chinese games, hours of conversations, oolong tea, but also a sanctuary: a place of acceptance, filled with its own contradictions, conflicts and defects, but always a safe and wide space, a place where one can rest from not belonging.
I don’t know how to describe the vertigo that I have experimented as an autochthonous child of this floating island when the thought of losing it surges. It must be because of this vertigo that I would consume myself so many times trying to protect and restore it in the face of any damage that I would find. As we were growing and adding more members to our island, some passing, and others that are still enjoying the changing insular landscape, the lesson I have learned which also helps me calm my Sunday anguish is the following hypothesis: “The secret of the island that my parents made is that its final purpose has been to teach its inhabitants that roots and roofs don’t always have to have existed, and it is also not necessary that they always remain, they can move, generate, they can be built and germinated, and then they can change again.”
When I was younger I considered the dislocation which was provoked by my parents’ migration as a factor that deprived us of things, which is true. What I wasn’t able to see to then comprehend until later was that their decision to spawn roots in the air like an act of magic has taught me what real acceptance is about. It taught me to make that same magic: to germinate air roots, which take the invisible water in the air and transform it into place, into family, into a sanctuary: into an island.
Museum Video here
Photographs by Juan Tribaldos
